Please Be Honest With Your Chefs/servers About Your Food Allergies And Severity. Trust That People Are

Please be honest with your chefs/servers about your food allergies and severity. Trust that people are decent and don’t want to cause customers pain or trips to the hospital. But food service workers are not doctors and are not paid to be or trained to be doing a health history on every single customer who asks for a menu modification. If you have an allergy or are ordering food for someone who does then it is on you the customer to be your own advocate.

Hey real quick PSA: If you have food allergies TELL RESTAURANTS. I know it’s inconvenient and sometimes people are shitty but for real, please, tell waitstaff it’s allergy specific, don’t just order it without the allergy ingredient.

This was brought up in my mind again since my step-MIL would get furious if someone presented her with a food she couldn’t eat with her Crohn’s but she’d never told them in the first place what she couldn’t have or how severe her reactions were.

When I worked at the pizza place a ton of people would order pizzas without cheese for a variety of reasons, but only occasionally would they say it was because of an allergy.

This one day a white lady came in and ordered three pizzas with no cheese. I have no explanation for why I followed up, especially because she was extremely moody and snippy. But I asked, “Is this because of an allergy?”

“Yes,” she snapped.

“If it’s for an allergy you should know we do use a small amount of cheese in the red sauce as well. Is the allergy severe?”

“What? Yes, he’ll literally die, his throat closes up and stuff.”

I stared at her. Someone she was serving pizza to would die on contact with cheese? And she didn’t even bother to tell us that?!!?? Why in gods name was she even in a pizza place???

“Don’t you have anything without cheese?” She demanded.

I ended up doing a garlic rubbed crust with toppings.

I had to scrub down all the counters and surfaces and grab fresh bins for all the toppings to try to avoid any cross contamination and the extra time made her roll her eyes in exasperation. Like I’m sorry safety protocols are inconvenient but I hope this person you’re trying to murder leaves your life.

But anyway. Please be safe. Disclose your allergies.

Your body is an ancestor. Your body is an altar to your ancestors. Every one of your cells holds an ancient and anarchic love story. Around 2.7 billion years ago free-living prokaryotes melted into one another to form the mitochondria and organelles of the cells that build our bodies today. All you need to do to honor your ancestors is to roll up like a pill bug, into the innate shape of safety: the fetal position. The curl of your body, then, is an altar not just to the womb that grew you, but to the retroviruses that, 200 million years ago taught mammals how to develop the protein syncytin that creates the synctrophoblast layer of the placenta. Breathe in, slowly, knowing that your breath loops you into the biome of your ecosystem. Every seven to ten years your cells will have turned over, rearticulated by your inhales and exhales, your appetites and proclivity for certain flavors. If you live in a valley, chances are the ancient glacial moraine, the fossils crushed underfoot, the spores from grandmotherly honey fungi, have all entered into and rebuilt the very molecular make up of your bones, your lungs, and even your eyes. Even your lungfuls of exhaust churn you into an ancestor altar for Mesozoic ferns pressurized into the fossil fuels. You are threaded through with fossils. Your microbiome is an ode to bacterial legacies you would not be able to trace with birth certificates and blood lineages. You are the ongoing-ness of the dead. The alembic where they are given breath again. Every decision, every idea, every poem you breathe and live is a resurrection of elements that date back to the birth of this universe itself. Today I realize that due to the miracle of metabolic recycling, it is even possible that my body, somehow, holds the cells of my great-great grandmother. Or your great-great grandmother. Or that I am built from carbon that once intimately orchestrated the flight of a hummingbird or a pterodactyl. Your body is an ecosystem of ancestors. An outcome born not of a single human thread, but a web of relations that ripples outwards into the intimate ocean of deep time.

Your Body is an Ancestor, Sophie Strand

Oops, found something beautiful, better think about this all day.

Who makes the porn bots. Where do they come from. What do they hope to achieve.

I live for stories like this of knowable Gods.

You meet god and she's mostly dead fish. You ask her why and she says most of the world is dead fish, and she's made herself to appeal to the most common denominator, the everyman funnyman comedy show that runs for eleven seasons but with the entire universe in mind. You ask her how much of the dead fish is your fault, she says it's far less than you'd think, in the grand scheme of things. You ask her if you matter at all. If you can do anything. She shrugs her rotting shoulders and says mattering is a made-up concept, like life, but sure, you can matter if you want to, on some scale. She has many scales. She doesn't know what you mean by 'anything', but you can do everything you can. You ask her if it's enough. She says there's no base requirement for deserving to exist. She's smoking a joint and the smoke filtering out of her gills gathers and forms gas giants and red dwarfs. You ask her if there's any hidden secrets of the universe you should know and she says it's not a secret if she tells, plus it's fun to let you figure it out yourself. You ask her if any of your questions were right questions and she says you worry about being right so much it might keep you from fucking around, which is as close to meaning of life as she ever bothered to make. You don't ask but she says she loves your hair, also your whole being, also your planet. She says she figured out what love is yesterday and is trying it out, which explains the ten thousand rainbows and sudden influx in rains of fish. She offers you a drag of her joint and you wake up half past midnight behind a chain restaurant clutching a smoked salmon. The new stars are winking like they're in on some joke and you're sure if you try hard enough you'll remember what it is.

The only way out is through.

You are inconsistent. You do not need to have a grand unified theory about what to do about Michael Jackson. You are a hypocrite, over and over. You love Annie Hall but you can barely stand to look at a painting by Picasso. You are not responsible for solving this unreconciled contradiction. In fact, you will solve nothing by means of your consumption; the idea that you can is a dead end. The way you consume art doesn't make you a bad person, or a good one. You'll have to find some other way to accomplish that.

Claire Dederer, Monsters

This is my uncle in 1984.